In:
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, SAGE Publications, Vol. 49, No. 10 ( 2023-10), p. 1495-1510
Abstract:
Understanding when people are likely to feel ambivalent is important, as ambivalence is associated with key attitude outcomes, such as attitude-behavior consistency. Interestingly, the presence of conflicting positive and negative reactions (objective ambivalence) is weakly related to feeling conflicted (subjective ambivalence). We tested a novel situation that can influence the correspondence between objective and subjective ambivalence: whether a message and a recipient’s topic match in affective versus cognitive orientation. When a person encounters a message with an affective or cognitive match to the topic, conflicting reactions may be more accessible, increasing feelings of ambivalence. Across five studies, greater objective–subjective ambivalence correspondence occurred with an affective–cognitive match between message and topic orientation. Studies 4 and 5 also demonstrated that this primarily occurred when the message was counterattitudinal. This work contributes to the literature explaining the gap between measures of objective and subjective ambivalence as well as how messages can influence attitude strength properties.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0146-1672
,
1552-7433
DOI:
10.1177/01461672221102015
Language:
English
Publisher:
SAGE Publications
Publication Date:
2023
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2047603-6
SSG:
5,2
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